A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Topic: Trade and Immigration

The Obama administration is ready to follow through on campaign promises to crack down on U.S. companies that “ship jobs overseas.” The administration announced this weekend that it would seek to raise taxes on the so-called active earnings of U.S.-owned affiliates abroad. According to a front-page story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Under current law, U.S. companies can defer taxes indefinitely on the many of the profits they say they have earned overseas until they “repatriate” that money back to the U.S. The administration seeks to sharply limit the tax deductions that companies taking advantage of deferral can take.

Of course, there is a perfectly good reason why we don’t tax what U.S. companies earn and keep abroad: those companies are already paying taxes in the countries where their affiliates are located, and at the same rates that apply to multinationals from other countries competing in the same markets.

As I pointed out in a Cato Free Trade Bulletin in January, locating affiliates in foreign markets is now the chief way that U.S. companies reach new customers outside the United States. If we sock them with the relatively high U.S. corporate rate, U.S. companies will be less able to compete against German and Japanese multinationals in the same markets who need only pay the (almost always) lower corporate rate assessed by the host country. And as I noted in January, any jobs created at affiliates abroad tend to promote more employment at the parent company back in the United States.

This demagogic grab for more revenue will only cripple the ability of U.S. companies to expand their sales in global markets, putting in jeopardy the U.S.-based jobs that support their foreign affiliates.

A small group of Chrysler debt holders rejected the Obama administration’s restructuring plan last night, leaving Chapter 11 bankruptcy as the most salient option for the company.

The Obama administration accused the investors who walked away of “failure to act…in the national interest.” But it’s not difficult to understand why these secured creditors rejected the government’s offer of essentially 29 cents on their investment dollar. If that is how the Obama administration treats capital markets, how exactly do they expect to spur private investment in American companies, as the White House claims it wants to do?

Bankruptcy reorganization will probably yield a better deal for investors than the government’s plan. It also will imbue the process with more financial sanity than anything the Obama administration cooked up. For instance: the historically overindulged United Auto Workers might be forced to make more “sacrifices” than being handed a 55 percent stake in the company—essentially what the core of the administration’s plan would have accomplished—or reducing their CBA-mandated breaks from 16 minutes to 13 minutes.

Bankruptcy has been the best option all along. That was clear the moment it was determined that new private capital or adequate sales revenues would not be available to fund operations. But once the Bush administration circumvented Congress to throw Chrysler (and GM) a lifeline, and the Obama administration followed suit with implicit backing, uncertainty prevailed and the problem persisted. The bankruptcy process will produce a less politically driven solution.

A coalition of more than 70 groups around the world, from Canada to Brazil to Kyrgyzstan to Germany to China to Japan to Kenya, has joined together to stop the dangerous stirrings of protectionism. The FreedomToTrade.org coalition (coordinated internationally by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the International Policy Network) has circulated a petition (signed by over 1,000 economists and thousands of others) and is now producing documentaries to alert the public to the dangers posed by protectionism. This one is on the role the Smoot-Hawley Tariff played in turning a serious recession into the Great Depression.

The mini-documentary is also being made available in 12 other languages. The Spanish version will be available on Cato’s Spanish-language project, ElCato.org. Others are available on YouTube.

This information is important and needs to be widely shared. Pass it on…

World governments should be careful not to play politics with the Mexican swine flu outbreak. The health consequences should of course be rigorously addressed—but without adding economic consequences, which is what several countries appear poised to do.

Public health scares have a history of seeping into trade policy without anything resembling sufficient consideration of the evidence. Governments in Russia and East Asia are already banning pork exports from Mexico, even though there is zero evidence that they pose a health hazard. It hearkens back to unfounded bans of U.S. beef in recent years by the European Union and South Korea.

If the U.S. government jumps on board, U.S. exports could be targeted for retaliatory trade actions. One quarter of U.S. pork production is exported, as well as billions of dollars of our soybeans used as feed by foreign hog farmers.

Exploiting this crisis could turn what is so far a manageable health problem into an unnecessary trade and diplomatic conflict. Obviously the global economy does not need the extra strain.

Since taking office, President Obama seems to have discovered that anti-trade rhetoric, while popular on the campaign trail, isn’t so useful to a sitting president whose policies will have lasting consequences, says trade analyst Daniel J. Ikenson in a new Cato study.

Adopt a China policy of carrots and sticks, including a continued push for China to open more of its markets while resorting to the WTO dispute settlement system only when the situation and facts support doing so.

Craft a proactive agenda now for implementation when trade consensus re-emerges.

It appears that the Obama administration is high on transparency for everyone but its own allies. There are a lot of good reasons to reduce federal regulation, but if the Labor Department is going to push coercive unionism, it should require unions to disclose their activities and finances to their members.

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. Instead, union officials will now be allowed to file older, less detailed conflict reports.

The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor, who also worked on the Obama transition team on labor issues.

The only people served by this move are union officials who want less oversight over their use of dues payments, much collected from unwilling workers. The new policy certainly runs counter to the president’s promise to set a new tone in Washington.

Intentionally or not, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has created the impression that the national ID law might go away. But simply renaming the Department of Homeland Security’s national ID program is not a repeal of REAL ID.

The REAL ID revival bill that has been circulating is the same national identification and tracking system with a few of the sharpest corners taken off and the hope of federal money held out to up-to-now recalcitrant states. The REAL ID revival bill would corral every American citizen into the national ID system to try and attack illegal immigrants.

Bills to repeal REAL ID were introduced in the previous Congress, but they did not move because the Bush administration and Chertoff DHS would have eagerly demagogued the issue. Those political conditions no longer hold. And just 10 months ago, Secretary Chertoff delayed the implementation of REAL ID without bringing any political repercussions to the Bush administration whatsoever. Secretary Napolitano can do the same if Congress fails to truly repeal REAL ID, as it should.